Here's my favorite "nature deficit disorder" story: Years ago, my non-outdoorsy boyfriend and I planned a little camping trip, reserving a campsite online at a Wisconsin state park. We got a late start and pulled into the ranger station just as evening was descending. It turned out this was not the kind of campsite where you drive up in your car, but the kind where you hike in. We had no backpacks. We had two suitcases, a tent the size of a Quonset hut and a cooler the size of a steamer trunk. Dusk was falling rapidly. We had no flashlights.

"How many blocks is it to the campsite?" my boyfriend said.

The ranger's eyes flicked down to his sneakers, then back to our faces. "About 13 blocks," he said, his face impassive. It was like having a Frenchman speak English to you in Paris. You knew he was thinking, "Quel cretin."

Nature deficit disorder isn't an actual medical diagnosis: It's an argument posed by Richard Louv in "Last Child in the Woods" (Algonquin, 2005) that children today are growing up alienated from nature, and this absence impoverishes their imaginations and their physical, mental and emotional health.

"Animal Secrets" at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum is a new exhibit that attempts to bring children and nature together, with 5,000 square feet of Illinois animal habitats for kids to explore — indoors. The exhibit re-creates the natural environments of a stream, a cave, the woods and a meadow.

"This is why we do exhibits like this," says Steve Sullivan, the museum's senior curator of urban ecology. "We want to give people information so they can feel comfortable going outdoors."

The habitat portrayals feature 12 different live animals, including darter fish, tree frogs, a tiger salamander and a fox snake. Also on display will be 30 taxidermied specimens from the Chicago Academy of Sciences' collection, including a porcupine, fox, deer, short-tailed shrew and a beaver, North America's largest rodent.

There are lots of play spaces for kids to interact with and in. They can pretend to build an eagle's nest, hunt for chipmunks in the chipmunk's den, climb on the raccoon log and poke around in a cave to find places where a bat might live. For older kids, there is a naturalist's tent, with hands-on gear. The exhibit has plentiful information labels, murals and signs to pique children's interest.

Adults can learn interesting facts as well, and certified naturalist volunteers will be on hand to explain natural phenomena, such as the short-tailed shrew, which, Sullivan says, looks like a three-inch tube of fur. But though it's a tiny creature, it has a big story to tell.

"Almost no one ever sees them," he says. "If we do notice them, people think it's a mouse, but their population is much lower than mice." This is because of the shrew's lifestyle: An agitated and voracious insectivore, the shrew rushes about, consuming its weight in insects every day in order to stay alive. When communities spray to kill mosquitoes, all arthropods are exterminated: honeybees, spiders, centipedes, butterflies, moths. Eventually these insects will reproduce and return, "but in the amount of time it takes insects to recolonize an area," Sullivan says, "the shrew has starved to death, which again is going to increase the pest species, which is going to increase the spraying."

So while the children are building a beaver dam in the stream, parents gain ideas and messages they can apply in their daily lives, especially the idea that we all need to connect with nature more. In "Last Child in the Woods," Louv cites a 10-year study that compared recovery rates of gallbladder surgery patients who were in rooms with windows that faced a grove of trees with those whose windows faced a brick wall: Patients who could see the trees were discharged earlier.

"There's nothing wrong with living in cities instead of the country," Sullivan says. "But we need to understand the values of these systems."

And perhaps it doesn't go without saying that understanding the value of nature might motivate us to take better care of it.